Cut our bloated military: Editorial

The United States spends more on defense than the next 13 nations combined.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel spoke to members of the 101st Airborne Airborne Division at Jalalabad Airfield on March 9 near the southeast of Jalalabad City, Afghanistan.Jason Reed-Pool/Getty Images

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel warned recently that spending cuts mandated by sequestration will force the Pentagon to reduce the size of America’s armed forces, or to equip our troops with less advanced weapons, or both.

But before ringing any alarms, let’s pause for perspective. We have been on a defense spending binge since the Sept. 11 attacks. The defense budget today is larger than it was at the height of the Reagan buildup, when we faced a Soviet military with 5 million troops under arms and thousands of advanced tanks and ships.

That is an obscene extravagance we can no longer afford. Much of this spending is fueled not by military necessity, but by political dysfunction. The Pentagon wants to close redundant bases, for example, and Congress won’t allow it. The same goes for the extravagant retirement benefits for military personnel, which are saddling the Pentagon with the kind of spiraling health care costs that brought the auto industry to its knees.

Military services compete with one another to build independent capabilities that drive up the costs. And members of Congress, eager to bring Pentagon spending to their home districts, press for overproduction of expensive systems such as the F-35 Joint Strike Fighters and V-22 helicopter, even in the face of staggering cost overruns.
The result of all this is that we are spending more on our military this year than the next 13 nations combined — and most of them are our allies or friends. Our Navy alone spends more than China’s entire military.

It’s time to rethink our global military footprint and to scale back. Yes, sequestration is a clumsy instrument because it requires across-the-board cuts that follow no strategic road map. It would make more sense to plan a careful phase-down over the next decade, backloaded so the change would be less disruptive.

But it is time to rethink our strategic role in the world. Do we really need 11 aircraft carrier groups when no other nation has more than one? Do we need to spend hundreds of billions of dollars modernizing a nuclear arsenal that is far larger than it needs to be? Do we need to maintain a heavy troop presence in Europe, even as our NATO allies have scaled back their own spending?

Many military experts, Republican and Democrat, believe we can deeply reduce spending without damaging our national security. Lawrence Korb, a Navy combat veteran who served as Reagan’s assistant secretary of defense, points out that Reagan reduced military spending in his second term as the Soviet threat receded, and argues that Reagan would cut today’s budget if he were president now. He notes that even if sequestration takes full effect, spending a decade from now will be roughly equivalent to what it was in 2007.

Rep. Rob Andrews (D-1st Dist.), a member of the House Committee on Armed Services, co-authored a paper in 2011 that would cut $572 billion over a decade, roughly the amount that would be required under sequestration. It is full of reasonable ideas, including shrinking U.S. forces abroad by 100,000 troops, reducing the number of new F-35s by half and cutting the number of aircraft carriers from 11 to 10.

Hagel himself called the defense budget “bloated” when he served in the Senate. He was right. And if sequestration forces the discussion on how to scale back, then it will have served at least some constructive purpose.